Home for all technology and products -- news, features and interviews of top-notch enterprises in India. This portal covers all the major happenings across verticals including telecom, mobility, gadgets & gizmo, retail, services, BFSI, energy, manufacturing, SMBs, business technologies, GreenIT, outsourcing...

SILICON VILLAGE

Tuesday, April 18, 2017

Unperturbed by Possible Changes to H-1B Visa Regime: TCS CEO

Unfazed by the possible changes to the H1-B visa regime, CEO of India’s IT
major TCS Rajesh Gopinathan has said the current discourse on the issue in the
US is driven by emotions rather than economy and the best way to tackle it is
through greater engagement.

Gopinathan
favoured a policy of engagement with various stake holders on the issue of H-1B
visas in the US. He noted that the discourse is currently driven by emotions
rather than economy. “The best way to tackle that is greater engagement.
Because the way, sometimes, companies like us get characterised is very
different from the reality of what we bring to the table,” Gopinathan said.

“Some
of these engagements actually help get that message out also. People will
understand us better for who we are, and I think engagement, communication and
collaboration is the best way to deal with the political lack of understanding
which comes. Democracy ought to deal with the emotional response that you see
and you have to get over it and engage positively,” Gopinathan said.

He said
the US has been a “very welcoming market” for the IT major and has provided it
with a fair, open and competitive environment. “All said and done, the US has
been a very welcoming market for us. So you keep aside the immediate issues,
it’s been a market that has been fair, it has been an open, competitive
environment,” Gopinathan told the agencies, exuding confidence that
TCS would be able to successfully compete in any environment.

Gopinathan
said TCS has competed and has won against the best in the country. “We have
competed and we have won against the global best in this country, on equal
footing. So, it has been a market that has helped us grow in confidence as we
have gone,” he said but repeatedly refrained from having any complaint from the
present system or the possibility of a new executive order that would adversely
have an impact on his company’s performance due to any action by the Trump Administration
on H-1B visas.

US
President Donald Trump is set to sign an executive order that would tighten the
process of issuing the H-1B visas and seek a review of the system for creating
an “entirely new structure” for awarding these visas.

Gopinathan
was appointed as the new CEO of TCS this January after his predecessor N
Chandrasekaran was elevated to the post of Chairman of Tata Sons.

Responding
to questions on a potential executive order or legislations being talked about
lawmakers, Gopinathan asserted that there is no law currently in the US that is
discriminatory. “There are many that are being discussed, which if they were to
get passed, in their extreme form would be discriminatory. So we should
actually give credence to the system here, that is, as I said, it is fair. It
has been fair in the past, there is no reason for us to assume that it will not
be fair in the future. So, let’s deal with what’s on the ground and let’s go
step by step,” he said.

“More
importantly, we have very active STEM education engagement in the US. We work
with colleges, high school students, we reach out, we have touched close to
20,000 plus students already, and significantly we are accelerate that into
what we call Ignite My Future Campaign. We just target to touch one million
students all in the next five years,” he said.

Noting
that the technology market is actually under supplied, he said the sheer demand
of technical skills far outstrips the supply. “What we’ve been successful in
India is to actually increase the world supply, often generating graduates way
beyond what the governing systems actually provided. So we capitalised the
emergence of a private sector education complex that served to provide us the
talent required for our growth,” he said.